The Social Security Administration just announced a 3.6 percent cost-of-living adjustment (COLA) for benefits paid beginning in January 2027. The adjustment reflects the increase in average prices from the third calendar quarter of 2025 to the third quarter of 2026. It will add an estimated $56 billion to Social Security spending in calendar year 2027 compared with leaving benefits unadjusted, according to the Cato Social Security model.

Protecting beneficiaries from inflation is reasonable. But Social Security’s COLA relies on an index with limited population coverage that does not fully account for how consumers respond to changes in relative prices. That means taxpayers are financing benefit increases that exceed those under a more accurate measure of inflation, such as the chained CPI.

Savings from Adopting a More Accurate COLA

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The New York Times tells us that tariffs on musical instruments are making prices so high that student musicians in many junior high school and high school bands and orchestras across the country can no longer afford instruments, nor can their budget-strapped schools afford to provide them. Tariffs on musical instruments are more than twice as high as they were in President Donald Trump’s first term, and some instruments now cost thousands of dollars.

As a result, Times reporter Sydney Ember explains, “Proponents of musical education say the tariffs are endangering school music programs and threatening to push the extracurricular activity out of reach for many families.”

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After law professor Fareed Hayat finished his meal at a Maryland pancake restaurant, he put his three kids in the rear-facing seats in the trunk of his Tesla. Someone believed he was kidnapping them and called the police. Officers went to Hayat’s home and questioned him and his wife on their porch. Professor Hayat denied that there was a kidnapping and tried to go inside, telling officers they could not come in. They stopped him from shutting the door, then entered the hall to handcuff him. They released him after determining that he had not kidnapped anyone. 

Professor Hayat brought a civil rights suit. The district court granted the defendants’ motions to dismiss and for summary judgment, holding that the officers were entitled to complete a Terry investigative stop by entering a house. The Fourth Circuit affirmed this decision.

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Today, the Cato Institute is launching Restoring Free Enterprise, a new project examining the federal government’s growing ownership and control of private companies and how to reverse it.

Washington’s expanding involvement in the businesses it regulates threatens the competition and innovation that underpin American prosperity. Our project will examine the consequences of that involvement and chart a path toward getting Washington out of the boardroom.

The site brings together several resources:

• An introduction by Scott Lincicome explaining the threats to American free enterprise posed by the government’s turn toward corporate ownership.
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Over 30 people die per day in drunk driving crashes, according to national estimates. 

One mechanism for reducing these deaths might be restrictions on the kind of business that can sell alcohol. Researchers studied such laws in Texas, where 

cities can use local option elections to decide whether to permit particular types of alcohol sales [e.g, at on-premise locations like restaurants versus off-premise locations like liquor stores]. 

The findings suggest that

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Recently, the White House and some of the leading artificial intelligence (AI) companies released a “Joint Commitment on Frontier Responsibilities.” This voluntary document charts a path toward a self-regulation standard for governing frontier AI systems. The document is an innovative approach that provides both the government and industry with the flexibility to adapt to the rapidly evolving capabilities of AI systems and helps prevent some of the most common pitfalls of government intervention. This commitment should provide a valuable building block for the regulation of the AI industry, but some questions are left unanswered. 

While the responsibilities and commitments of the industry are explicit and clear, the document does not address key questions regarding the role of government and leaves the industry with a lack of clarity on when, how, and under what justification the government can intervene in the market and what tools it is allowed to use.

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Number 32 in our series of occasional roundups on election law and policy, this time focusing on threats to the security of the upcoming midterm election: 

• “‘Mail early’: Election officials urge people to get ballots in pronto amid Postal Service slowdowns.” [Dion Nissenbaum, VoteBeat] One analysis of Democratic-leaning voters in four states finds them requesting mail ballots less often and returning them more quickly, both rational responses to declining reliability of delivery, whether you attribute that to budget-cutting or otherwise. [Michael Morse and Marc Meredith, NBC News] 
• Election-law expert Justin Levitt argues that Trump has almost uniformly failed in his attempts to interfere with the 2026 election and that chances are good that states and localities can withstand whatever further interference he comes up with. [NYU Law Democracy Project] 
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